


little librarian

by Anonymous



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Gen, Karl Jacobs-centric, Tales From The SMP
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 10:35:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28972923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Honk. There's blood on your nice travelling coat again. Another patch job to rush before the boys get home. It's not their fault you have the urge to see, to decide which of the stories are real and which are...decidedly not. They shouldn't have to deal with it, and if you're honest you don't know how to explain the morbid fascination.It sure doesn't help your memory, to keep trying. But you have to. Some selfish aspect of you wants to.---Troubled by the implications of Mizu's existence, what is left of Karl Jacobs reflects on his ever-more precarious position and relationships.
Relationships: (like. the dsmp characters are engaged but i think these are the streamers so. no), Alexis | Quackity & Karl Jacobs & Sapnap, No Romantic Relationship(s)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 121
Collections: Anonymous





	little librarian

**Author's Note:**

> speedran this! please leave some kudos and a comment accordingly if you enjoyed

Your name is, usually, Karl Jacobs. You'd like to think that you are a hopeful man, beneath it all. You like to think a lot of things. You like to think you aren't quite real. This is likely a dangerous delusion for a chronic time traveller to have.

And anyway, even the book isn't always as real as it feels. That one took a horrible, horrible week to figure out. It's not just a time machine; it's a living story, as evidenced by the time you went to the beach. Oh, the beach. It was warm, and exciting, and everyone was everyone's friend. Not all of the stories are as obviously fake as that, and even less are half as kind.

The Tales where you don't know any of the faces are sometimes the best ones. In the end they always come back to home, though, in heart-rending twists that make life itself feel authored. Ranbob and Jack, thousands of years apart, the miseries of a past and a future you can't even authenticate, remind you of your neighbours more than should be honking possible.

It kind of begins to screw with you, the consistent narrative cohesion of your many lives. So you stop thinking about it. Because Mizu, especially, is a lot. At first you think Isaac is a good, solid man to be. But he is too trusting, too curious; he watches his friends and boyfriend die, and he bleeds out on the altar of a god the real world no longer believes in. He never will know who Dream was. It is a sad end. You leave him in Benji's scarred arms and try not to think about the too-familiar sound of Ranbob's sobbing. It's about time you checked up on that enderman hybrid kid.

Afterwards you start a diary. Even though your fingers are cramped and filmy with ink, you tug out another moleskin from the crates in the library and write as much as you can in scribbled shorthand. Because you pity the lonely murderous boy from Mizu, more than anything. Because you're worried that you lost yourself, for a moment, in the allure of being a simple fisherman. Because you will not let there be a world where your friends and foes are forgotten so ignominiously.

And hey, you'll admit, it was kind of bothersome to be reduced to your childhood cartoons and being one of Sapnap's spouses. He and Quackity would find that funny, you think. If you could tell them, which you can't.

Locking the door behind you as if nothing important is studded into the hill, you look out over the crater and swallow. Although in war you have never been particularly loyal, Mizu's bastardisation of this place's long and illustrious history chafes against your collar. It's not fair. It's just not fair.

Honk. There's blood on your nice travelling coat again. Another patch job to rush before the boys get home. It's not their fault you have the urge to see, to decide which of the stories are real and which are...decidedly not. They shouldn't have to deal with it, and if you're honest you don't know how to explain the morbid fascination. It sure doesn't help your memory, to keep trying. But you have to. Some selfish aspect of you wants to.

Your favourite is the Tale in which all of you are okay. Not always happy, not always friends, not always fixed. Not like the plasticky upbeat atrocity of the beach, that's for darn sure. Just...alright.

It's a concrete and honest snapshot of a time you peg as roughly a year in the future. It's horribly nice. Snowchester and the Punz SMP are locked in a kind of casually friendly arms race, but it's all for status - nobody's tried to start anything in months. The commune to the north keeps itself to itself, generally, but sometimes there are festivals. And sometimes, of course, one must visit a grave.

Some of the people you don't even recognise as you stroll through through town or pad through the snow. Slime, Foolish and Hannah are the last additions you remember, and talking to them feels adjacent to cheating. To existing, offensively. You want to get to know them in the present, through shared struggles and choked-out banter - not through the goofy _Groundhog Day_ powers granted by your wonderful, awful book. So you ignore them, and many others. Most of your neighbours, and their houses, and their friends, and their struggles, reduced in your mind to squiggles on a page. To background characters. You are an audience of one, playing the part of yourself, and you know what you came here to see.

Every time you do come here, you remember less about your present self and body. Here you wear hoodies, and slouch, and foster the beginnings of a beard. Luckily, here, you are also always content. That has always been the most reliable way to tell this Karl apart from whoever you really are.

Sunset approaches far too quickly. In the time you have before the end of the Tale, you almost always go on a picnic with two people that remember marrying you, slightly taller and more solemn than in real life, you mean, the present. Nobody disturbs you as you eat and giggle and make silly references to buildings that only exist here. Not a single declaration of war or screaming argument or terrible roar ever rings out around the overgrown crater where you sing old songs that used to make you cringe. None of you ever wear armour - only identical thin golden bands - and you don't speak of Dream after your first seventeen times trying, and it is always the best day of your life. Every single time. Some people are probably significantly worse off in this timeline, but with warm arms slung around your shoulders and warm rays beating down on your forehead you cannot bring yourself to care.

When things are at their worst you like to open the book and force yourself nauseatingly towards that particular Tale. Surely it's a waltz of guilt and self-contempt afterwards, but first you get to relive the day between the pages of love and laughter and sunshine, and try to convince yourself that it's one of the true stories scattered through the book.

But it's not, and you know it's not. It's just one of the many selfish reasons that you can't close the book forever, go home, slip silently into your totally-normal-sized-bed, thank you very much. No amount of jokes could soften the blow of truth. Even if you didn't know, deep in your bones, that happy endings are for children, the Tale's title would be a dead giveaway. Your fingertips know the raised shape of the letters the way time knows you down to the ugly core.

 _The World That Couldn't Be_.


End file.
